The
Moderate Roman Catholic Position
on Contraception and Abortion
By Professor Daniel C. Maguire, Catholic Theologian, Marquette University
Reprinted here with kind permission of the author. (Cartoon below my idea)
Let's start with the Roman
Catholic positions (note the plural) on contraception and abortion not because
it is the oldest religious tradition---it is not---but because of its influence
internationally on these issues. For one thing, the Catholic Church is the only
world religion with a seat in the United Nations. From that seat, the Vatican
has been very active in promoting the most restrictive Catholic view on family
planning, although there are more liberating Catholic views that are also
thoroughly and genuinely Catholic. The Vatican from its unduly privileged perch
in the United Nations along with the "Catholic" nations---now newly
allied with conservative Muslim nations---managed to block reference to
contraception and family planning at the United Nations conference in Rio de
Janeiro in 1992. This alliance also delayed proceedings at the 1994 U.N.
conference in Cairo and impeded any reasonable discussion of abortion. With
more than a bit of irony, the then Prime Minister Brundtland of Norway said of the
Rio conference: "States that do not have any population problem--in one
particular case, even no births at all [the Vatican]--are doing their best,
their utmost, to prevent the world from making sensible decisions regarding
family planning."
The sudden rapport between
the Vatican and conservative Muslim states is interesting. For fourteen
centuries the relationship was stormy to the point of war and persecution.
During that time abortions were known to be happening and yet this produced no
ecumenical coziness. Is the issue really fetuses, or is it that these two
patriarchal bastions are bonded in the face of a neew threat...the emergence
free, self-determining women? Questions like this and all of the above summon
us to make Roman Catholicism the first of our visits to the world religions.
One of the tragedies of
human life is the separation of power and ideas. The Catholic tradition is more
filled with good sense and flexibility than one would gather from its leaders.
Religious leaders are often not equipped to give voice to the best in the
tradition they represent. In Catholicism, popes and bishops are usually not
theologians and often they do not express the real treasures of wisdom that
Catholicism has to offer to the world. That is changing as lay people enter the
field of Catholic theology and bring to it their real-life experience as
workers, parents, and professionals. Catholic theology is no longer a clergy
club, and that is gain.
One of these lay
theologians is professor Christine Gudorf. Christine is an internationally
known scholar teaching at The International University in Miami. She is also a
wife and a parent. Catholic theology was done in recent centuries almost
exclusively by men. That changed and women began in the last half of the
twentieth century to enrich the tradition with their scholarship and experience
as women.
Teilhard de Chardin, the
Jesuit scholar, said that nothing is intelligible outside its history. The
point is well taken. If we lost our personal history through amnesia, we would
not even know who we are. Gudorf believes along with many scholars that there
is nothing that clears the mind of caricatures like a bracing walk through
history.
The Catholic Story
Gudorf points out that Christianity was born in a world in which contraception
and abortion were both known and practiced. The Egyptians, Jews, Greeks and
Romans used a variety of method of contraception, including coitus interruptus,
pessaries, potions and condoms, and abortion appears to have been a widespread
phenomenon. Knowledge of all of this was available to the Christians and
although church leaders tried to suppress it they were never fully successful.
Surprisingly, abortion and
contraception were not the primary means of limiting fertility in Europe even
before the coming of Christianity. Infanticide was the main method as it was
elsewhere in the world. Christianity reacted against infanticide, but there is
evidence that it continued to be practiced. Late medieval and early modern
records show a high incidence of "accidental" infant death caused by
"rolling over" or smothering of infants or reporting their death as
"stillborn." As Gudorf says, "the level of layings over could
hardly have been fully accidental."
However, during the middle
ages infanticide was much less common than abandonment. Most often infants for
whom parents could not provide were left at crossroads, on the doorsteps of
individuals, or in marketplaces in the hope that the child would be adopted by
passersby. (More often it condemned the children to a life of slavery or an
early death.) To ease this crisis, the church in the middle ages provided for
"oblation." This meant that children could be offered to the church
to be raised in religious monasteries. Many of them eventually became celibate
nuns and monks, thus leading to further containment of fertility.
Another Catholic response
to excess fertility was the foundling hospital. The foundling hospitals were
equipped with a kind of "lazy Susan" wheel (ruota) where the child
could be placed anonymously and then the wheel turned putting the child inside.
The good intentions in this were not matched with resources and the vast
majority of these infants, sometimes 90 percent of them, were dead within
months. Because of the reliance on infanticide and abandonment, it is not
surprising that there was not much discussion about abortion and contraception.
As Gudorf says, "the primary pastoral battles in the first millennium were
around infanticide, the banning of which undoubtedly raised the incidence of abandonment."
Also the high mortality of children due to nutritional, hygienic, and medical
debits was a common and cruel form of population control.
Catholic Teaching on
Contraception and Abortion
Catholic
teaching on contraception and abortion has been anything but consistent. What most people--including most
Catholics- think of as "the Catholic position" on these issues
actually dates from the 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii of Pope Pius XI. Prior
to that, church teaching was a mixed and jumbled bag. The pope decided to tidy
up the tradition and change it by saying that contraception and sterilization
were sins against nature and abortion was a sin against life. As Gudorf says,
"both contraception and abortion were generally forbidden" in previous
teaching but both were often thought to be associated with sorcery and
witchcraft. Pope Gregory IX in the Decretals of 1230 treated both contraception
and abortion as "homicide." Some of the Christian Penitentials of the
early middle ages prescribed seven years of fasting on bread and water for a
layman who commits homicide, one year for performing an abortion, but seven
years for sterilization. Sterilization was considered more serious than
abortion because the issue was not framed as "pro-life" but rather,
the driving bias was anti-sexual. The traditional Christian attitudes toward
sexuality were so negative that it was only reproductivity that could justify
this activity. Abortion frustrated fertility once; sterilization could
frustrate it forever and therefore it was more serious. Also, since the role of
the ovum was not learned until the nineteenth century, the sperm were thought
to be little homunculi, miniature people, and for this reason male masturbation
was sometimes called homicide. Clearly Christian historical sexual ethics is a
bit of a hodge podge. To really understand it and to arrive at an informed
judgment on Catholic moral options it is necessary to be instructed by a little
more history.
Catholic and Pro-choice
Although it is virtually
unknown in much public international discourse, the Roman Catholic position on abortion is pluralistic. It has a strong
"pro-choice" tradition and a conservative anti-choice tradition.
Neither is official and neither is more Catholic than the other. The
hierarchical attempt to portray the Catholic position as univocal, an
unchanging negative wafted through twenty centuries of untroubled consensus, is
untrue. By unearthing this authentic openness to choice on abortion and on
contraception in the core of the tradition, the status of the anti-choice
position is revealed as only one among many Catholic views.
The bible does not condemn
abortion. The closest it gets to it is in Exodus 21-22 which speaks of
accidental abortion. This imposes a financial penalty on a man who "in the
course of a brawl" caused a woman to miscarry. The issue here is the
father's right to progeny; he could fine you for the misdeed, but he could not
claim "an eye for an eye" as if a person had been killed. Thus, as
conservative theologian John Connery, S.J. said, "the fetus did not have
the same status as the mother in Hebrew Law."
Following on the silence of
scripture on abortion, the early church history treats it only incidentally and
sporadically. Indeed, there is no systematic study of the question until the
fifteenth century. One early church writer Tertullian discusses what we would
today call a late term emergency abortion where doctors had to dismember a
fetus in order to remove it, and he refers to this emergency measure as a
"crudelitas necessaria," a necessary cruelty. Obviously this amounted
to moral approbation of what some call today inaccurately a "partial birth
abortion."
One thing that develops
early on and becomes the dominant tradition in Christianity is the theory of
delayed animation or ensoulment. Borrowed from the Greeks, this taught that the
spiritual human soul did not arrive in the fetus until as late as three months
into the pregnancy. Prior to that time, whatever life was there was not human.
They opined that the conceptum was enlivened first by a vegetative soul, then
an animal soul, and only when formed sufficiently by a human spiritual soul.
Though sexist efforts were made to say the male soul arrived sooner---maybe a
month and a half into the pregnancy---the rule of thumb for when a fetus
reached the status of "baby" was three months or even later. As
Christine Gudorf writes, the common pastoral view was "that ensoulment
occurred at quickening, when the fetus could first be felt moving in the
mother's womb, usually early in the fifth month. Before ensoulment the fetus
was not understood as a human person. This was the reason the Catholic church
did not baptize miscarriages or stillbirths."
"Reflecting the pious
belief in a resurrection of all the dead at the end of the world, Augustine
pondered if early fetuses who miscarried would also rise. He said they would
not. He added that neither would all the sperm of history rise again. (For that
we can all be grateful.) The conclusion reached by Latin American Catholic
theologians in a recent study is this: "It appears that the texts
condemning abortion in the early church refer to the abortion of a fully formed
fetus." The early fetus did not have the status of person nor would
killing it fit the category of murder.
This idea of delayed
ensoulment survived throughout the tradition. St. Thomas Aquinas, the most
esteemed of medieval theologians, held this view. Thus the most traditional and
stubbornly held position in Catholic Christianity is that early abortions are
not murder. Since the vast number of abortions done today in the United States,
for example, are early abortions, they are not, according to this Catholic
tradition, murder. Also, all pregnancy terminations done through the use of RU
486 would not qualify as the killing of a human person according to this
Catholic tradition of "delayed ensoulment."
In the fifteenth century,
the saintly archbishop of Florence, Antoninus, did extensive work on abortion.
He approved of early abortions to save the life of the woman, a class with many
members in the context of fifteenth century medicine. This became common
teaching. For this he was not criticized by the Vatican. Indeed, he was later
canonized as a saint and thus as a model for all Catholics. Many Catholics do
not know that there is a pro-choice Cathlic saint who was also an archbishop
and a Dominican.
In the sixteenth century,
the influential Antoninus de Corduba said that medicine that was abortifacient
could be taken even later in a pregnancy if required for the health of the mother.
The mother, he insisted, had a jus prius, a prior right. Some of the maladies
he discussed do not seem to have been a matter of life and death for the women
and yet he allows that abortifacient medicine even in these cases is morally
permissible. Jesuit theologian Thomas Sanchez who died in the early seventeenth
century said that all of his contemporary Catholic theologians approved of
early abortion to save the life of the woman. None of these theologians or
bishops were censured for these views. Note again that one of them, St.
Antoninus, was canonized as a saint. Their limited "pro-choice"
position was considered thoroughly orthodox and can be so considered today. In
the nineteenth century, the Vatican was invited to enter a debate on a very
late term abortion, requiring dismemberment of a formed fetus in order to save
the woman's life. On September 2, 1869 the Vatican refused to decide the case.
It referred the questioner to the teaching of theologians on the issue. It was,
in other words, the business of the theologians to discuss it freely and arrive
at a conclusion. It was not for the Vatican to decide. This appropriate modesty
and disinclination to intervene is an older and wiser Catholic model.
What this brief tour of
history shows is that a "pro-choice" position coexists alongside a
"no-choice" position in Catholic history and neither position can
claim to be more Catholic or more authentic than the other. Catholics are free
to make their own conscientious decisions in the light of this history. Not
even the popes claim that the position that forbids all abortion and
contraception is infallible. The teaching on abortion is not only not
infallible, it is, as Gudorf says "undeveloped." Abortion was not the
"birth limitation of choice because it was, until well into the twentieth
century, so extremely dangerous to the mother." There was no coherently
worked out Catholic teaching on the subject, as our short history tour
illustrates and there still is not. Some Catholic scholars today say all direct
abortions are wrong, some say there are exceptions for cases such as the danger
to the mother, conception through rape, detected genetic deformity, or other
reasons. Gudorf's sensible conclusion: "The best evidence is that the
Catholic position is not set in stone and is rather in development."
Sex, Women, and the
Sensus Fidelium
As we will see, debates
about sexuality and reproduction are always influenced mightily by certain
cultural assumptions. These usually involve attitudes toward women and sex. A
culture that looks on women as sources of evil like Pandora and Eve is going to
have trouble justifying having sex with them and may conclude that only
reproduction could justify sexual collusion with women. That is exactly what
happened in Christianity. Augustine said that if it were not for reproduction
there would be no use for women at all. In his words, "in any other task a
man would be better helped by another man." Early attitudes toward women
were poisonous. The Mosaic law assumed male ownership of women. Early church
writers said women lack reason and only possess the image of God through
connection to men. Luther saw women as being like nails in a wall, prohibited
by their nature from moving outside their domestic situation. And St. Thomas
Aquinas said females are produced from male embryos that were damaged through
some accident in the womb, turned into females. As Professor Gudorf says in her
refreshingly sensible book Body, Sex and Pleasure, the church has rejected all
of that nonsense but "continues to teach most of the sexual moral code
which was founded upon such thinking."
Small wonder there is new
thinking on sexual and reproductive ethics now. As Gudorf says: "The Roman
Catholic Church (and Christianity in general) has in the last century drastically
rethought the meaning of marriage, the dignity and worth of women, the
relationship between the body and the soul, and the role of bodily pleasure in
Christian life, all of which together have revolutionary implications for
church teaching on sexuality and reproduction. In effect, the foundations of
the old bans have been razed and their replacements will not support the walls
of the traditional ban."
Gudorf and other Catholic theologians do not stand alone in the church on this
dramatic and important change in Catholic teaching. Pope Pius XII in 1954 laid
the groundwork for a change in Catholic teaching when he permitted the rhythm
method. Though he quibbled about what means could be used he did bless
contraceptive intent and contraceptive results. He even said there could be
multiple reasons to avoid having any children at all in a marriage. In 1968
when Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the view that all mechanical or chemical
contraception was sinful, the Catholic bishops of fourteen different countries
respectfully disagreed and told the faithful that they were not sinners if they
could not accept this papal teaching.
Most of the laity, of
course, had already made up their minds. The birth rates in so-called
"Catholic" nations in Europe and in Latin America are close to or
below replacement levels and, as Gudorf wryly puts it, "it is difficult to
believe that fertility was cut in half through voluntary abstinence from
sex." Such dissent from hierarchical teaching by Catholic laity is
actually well provided for in Church teaching. The sensus fidelium, the sense
of the faithful is one of the sources of truth in Catholic theology. This means
that the consciences and experiences of good people are a guidepost to truth
that even the hierarchy must consult.
Catholicism in its best
historical realizations is not as hidebound and authoritarian as many bishops,
popes, and fearful conservatives would make it seem. There is, as Catholic
theologian Charles Curran says, dissent from hierarchical teaching that is
"in and for the church." Through much of Catholic history the
hierarchy taught that all interest-taking on loans was a sin of usury--even the
smallest amount. The laity saw that this was an error and decided that too much
interest was sinful and that a reasonable amount was not. A century or two
later, the hierarchy agreed...especially after the Vatican opened a bank and
learned some of the facts of financial life. The laity are again, along with
the theologians, leading the church on the moral freedom to practice contraception
and to use abortion when necessary as a backup. Perhaps if the hierarchy were
married with families, they could follow the wisdom of the laity in this at a
faster pace. It would be a shame if it took a century or two for them to
respect the conscience of the laity, graced and grounded as that conscience is
in the lived experience of marriage and children.
Professor Christine Gudorf
is hopeful in this regard. She believes that within a generation or two
Catholic hierarchical teaching "will change to encourage contraception in
marriage and to allow early abortion under some circumstances." She
continues: "This change will occur because as the Catholic Church
confronts the reality of a biosphere gasping for survival around its teeming human
inhabitants it will discern the will of God and the presence of the Spirit in
the choices of those who choose to share responsibility for the lives and
health and prosperity of future generations without reproducing themselves,
even if that choice involves artificial contraception and early abortion."
